The challenge for life is to find something that you enjoy doing, something that will sustain you, distract you, and delight you, when all else fails. Political activist Bruce Kent was interviewed in 1985 and remembers Clare as "a decent man who had done his homework . . . with a direct but non-hostile and honest approach. I was well used by then to journalists who had their own knives to grind. He got me to talk openly and frankly . . . I remember leaving the BBC that day and thinking that I had got quite a lot off my chest." In 2018, more than two decades after the Geller interview, and a decade after Clare’s untimely death, it is Geller who is lost in admiration, still deeply moved by his “subliminal connection” with Clare.

Cultivate a passion. If ligging on billionaires' yachts in the Med is your kind of thing, do it wholeheartedly. If you turned my stone over there ain’t nothing underneath it. It’s probably a boring stone for somebody like you who wants to find things out about people. What you’re seeing is actually what there is full stop. As for his media success, the treatment of mental illness is always the forgotten child of the health service. If Clare gave it a higher profile and made it a more attractive choice for the brightest students, well, why should anybody complain? Olivia O'Leary

In Search of Ourselves: A History of Psychology and the Mind

Through his research and his media presence, Clare was becoming one of Britain’s best-known psychiatrists. By 1983, aged only 41, he had become professor and head of psychological medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Discussing relationships, Savile said "it doesn’t matter to me if I’ve got people or I haven’t got people" while being at pains to point out "it’s not that I’m funny or weird or anything like that". On the subject of children, he offered this: "...so if you said to me, what about kids? I say basically I don’t think like them particularly but I get on well with them. Nothing wrong with that is there?" Clare interviewed Jimmy Savile - the psychiatrist found him chilling In Africa, we say that a person is a person through other persons. That’s why God gave Adam that delectable creature, Eve.’ Think of the Garden of Eden and be a leaf on a tree.  The photographs taken of the Queen at Royal Ascot as her horse won the Gold Cup showed a picture of pure happiness. Psychiatrist in the Chair - The Official Biography of Anthony Clare - by Brendan Kelly and Muiris Houston - documents a fascinating life in psychiatry and a prominent media profile, cut short with Clare's untimely death at 64 in 2007.

Before that, Clare was a regular contributor to Stop the Week, a programme devised by producer Michael Ember, who then worked on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. In an interview with the Radio Times before it aired, Clare spoke about the curious position occupied by the profession of psychiatry in the UK compared to the US and hoped the series would make the science behind psychiatry more accessible. Although the programme was sometimes accused of prying, Clare countered that "no one has ever complained about being abused on it". His interviewees were well aware of what was in store, he said. "The word psychiatric tells you that what will be talked about will be things like feelings, regrets, memories, emotions, drives. It helps to shift the talk away from all that usual showbiz stuff." a b c "Psychiatrist Anthony Clare dies". BBC News 24. 30 October 2007. Archived from the original on 31 October 2007 . Retrieved 30 October 2007. Ivan Illich and Laing had been the psychiatric gurus of the 1960s, and Psychiatry in Dissent was, said Wessely, "a sober response to the intellectual brilliance, but also excesses, of that decade.Soon after the inauguration of Radio 1 in 1967, he was recruited by the BBC; his weekly show ran for two decades from 1969. His old-fashioned showbiz style – "Now then, now then ..." – was worlds apart from his innovative fellow DJs from the pirate-radio world, and nobody could ever accuse Savile of being fired by a crusading zeal for finding and promoting revolutionary pop music. I can't really believe in a God that can suddenly and haphazardly intervene during one moment of history, causing air crashes, genocide and famine. [3] When asked by Dr Clare about his freedom from emotional attachments to people, Savile boasted: “I’m not constrained pretty well by anything. Patricia Casey writes: I first met Anthony in 1981, when I was a psychiatric researcher in Nottingham. He came to give a lecture, and my abiding memory was of a complex and erudite talk delivered without notes or slides. He invited me to visit his research department, and that began a long professional and collegial relationship with him.

In addition to interviewing and commenting in the media, Clare was a qualified doctor, the best-known psychiatrist of his generation, an accomplished researcher in psychological medicine, a son, a brother, a husband, a father and a public intellectual who combined knowledge and experience in a way that was humble and assertive, expert and inquisitive, and – above all else – imbued with deep compassion, a genuine interest in others and, when needed, a dispassionate sense of enquiry. Process and understandingMuch attention now focuses on his BBC Radio 4 series, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, but he was also making his name as a writer. He had begun his writing career with the school newspaper at Gonzaga in Dublin and continued to write at UCD. By the mid-seventies, he was a regular contributor to medical journals. I can go skint in a day. I can be finished like that. If a scandal comes up or something like that or the people go off you, you’re finished. I’d much rather go skint with a brand new Rolls Royce in the garage than one that’s eight years old that I love, because I’ll get more for it. The key task, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already known Sebastian Cody writes: I found Tony Clare coruscatingly intelligent, with an appealing analytic (not psychoanalytic) cast of mind which meant he saw through people and situations at a speed which dazzled me, without ever losing compassion or empathy. There are some gaps here. Clare had little time for psychoanalysis, or for Freud, but what did he think about Jung? And why was he so dismissive of psychotherapy, which, when practised by those who are properly accredited and supervised, has helped so many people? Maybe this is the difficulty of the posthumous biography. We can’t ask him.